Apples

My Apples poem, first published in the New Yorker this spring has been posted on Cynthia Haven’s Stanford book lover’s blog, the Bookhaven.

We ran into each other, as she says, outside Green Library, her on her way in, me coming out, both of us on our bikes and heading for the gym, though not the same gym. I hadn’t seen Cynthia since before we went to Paris in January so we spent a while catching up on our own news and that of mutual friends.

Cynthia is a biographer, most recently of René Girard, but also of Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky in her ‘Conversations With…” series. When we first came to Stanford and were renting on campus we used to see Girard, who lived not too far away, walking past our windows on his way to his office, a frail-looking figure with a small backpack. Once or twice I heard him speak in seminars, fascinated, and humbled by the way he made—without any flashiness—wide-ranging connections between vast fields of knowledge. I look forward to reading Cynthia’s new book.